Saturday, October 22, 2016

How Sri Lanka Demonstrates the Limits of the UN System

This
is a classic example of pursuing an important issue in a forum that’s not
equipped to handle it.

In recent years, the island nation of Sri
Lanka has received considerable attention from the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council. Country-specific
council resolutions were passed on Sri Lanka annually from 2012 to 2014. These
resolutions dealt broadly with alleged wartime abuses,
reconciliation and ongoing human-rights violations under the administration of
the increasingly authoritarian Mahinda Rajapaksa, who ruled the island nation
from 2005 to January 2015. Rajapaksa rejected all three of those resolutions
and used developments at the council to drum up domestic political support.

Rajapaksa was ousted in January 2015 and the new
government, led by Maithripala Sirisena, promised to rebalance Colombo’s
foreign policy and implement a wide-ranging reform agenda. With this in mind,
Sri Lanka cosponsored another UN Human Rights Council resolution in October
2015 that laid out a strong transitional justice agenda, including a truth
commission and an accountability mechanism to address allegations of wartime
abuses committed, by both Sri Lankan government forces and the separatist Tamil
Tigers, during the country’s twenty-six-year civil war that ended in May 2009.

Colombo’s compliance with this most recent resolution will be reviewed in
detail in March 2017, during the council’s thirty-fourth session. However, even
if Sri Lanka were to make significant progress in the coming months, the bottom
line is that the country’s transitional justice process will go beyond March
2017, even under the best of circumstances.

There are legitimate worries that, if Sri
Lanka falls off the council’s formal agenda, then Colombo may be even less
inclined to follow through on its previous commitments. After all, these are
difficult, controversial issues; so, sustained international engagement and
concomitant diplomatic pressure look more important than ever.

In this context, the passage of another
resolution on Sri Lanka during that thirty-fourth session would be eminently
helpful. But this is tricky for several reasons. For starters, Sri Lanka’s new
government has been welcomed with open arms by a range of Western nations,
including the United States—the driving force behind previous resolutions on
Sri Lanka. In addition, the United States is not a formal member of the council
this year, so a powerful ally may need to do a lot of the diplomatic legwork
behind the scenes (something that would need to start soon if there’s any
chance of another resolution on Sri Lanka even being tabled in the current
political context). The U.S. presidential election adds an additional layer of
complexity to the situation, and an outgoing Obama administration looks even
less inclined to encourage continued scrutiny on Sri Lanka’s new government.

The UN Human Rights Council can be a good venue to raise awareness about human
rights issues and encourage states to conform to international human-rights
norms, although it’s not really designed to usher in dramatic changes. This
isn’t to suggest that the United States should not devote diplomatic and
financial resources there. It should—and it’s better for the United States to
be a council member state than trying to influence diplomatic and political
processes from the sidelines. However, the recent case of Sri Lanka underscores
how messy and complicated multilateral diplomacy at this body can be. It also
illustrates the inherent challenges of pursuing country-specific initiatives
through a relatively short time horizon.

Taylor Dibbert is a freelance writer based
in Washington, DC.

Image: View of the Human Rights
Council during the urgent debate on Syria May 29, 2013. Flickr/Creative
Commons/U.S. Mission Geneva